Additionally news of bad customer services reaches more than twice as many ears as praise for a good service experience. That means it’s 12 times as hard to make up for a bad experience and twice as many people will hear about a bad experience as hear about a good one.

That’s how important customer service and making sure that your clients have an experience that WOWs them is to your business’ success!

Bad customer service can take down the most successful of businesses. On the flip side, 3 out of 5 Americans would try a new brand or company for a better service experience according to an American Express survey.

Great customer service also inspires loyalty in your clients, and it’s been shown by the White House Office Of Consumer Affairs that a loyal customer is worth on average up to 10 times the cost of their first purchase!

Today’s customers want instant gratification and they expect that you will be able to handle their customer service needs across a variety of platforms online.From Facebook to email, customers no longer want to tolerate pauses or delays and want to point or click for their customer service problems.

Businesses must adjust in order to handle transactions in real time across all of the Internet’s varied platforms.

This creates a need for GREAT customer service apps, to lighten the load and help you provide amazing customer service to your customers in real-time.

Customer Service Apps To Power Up Any Business

We’ve put together a non exhaustive list of services we are using or have been using in the past. Depending at what stages of growth your business is, you’ll find one service more suitable for your needs than another.

Let’s take a look at all these amazing products, listed in no particular order.

Slack

Slack is a communication app that allows you to communicate with your team on the go through a special slack channel. Slack allows you to drag, drop and share files, and link up to Google Drive Dropbox and other storage services. You can also set up Slack to work with your other tools and apps so that you don’t need to constantly be switching between tools eliminating the need to remember passwords and time consuming log ins. Slack is a must have for team communication in the 21st century.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an email service with a great easy to use app that will allow you to manage your lists, add new subscribers, send campaigns and view reports all with just a few taps on your smartphone.

Zoho

Zoho offers a series of apps, which are specifically created to help you easily and quickly enhance the functionality of your business while on the go. Zoho allows you to capture leads, digitize business cards into your smartphone, access your CRM, act as an admin for your mail and search effortlessly using Insight search, scan docs and quickly draft presentations on the go. Zoho allows you access to Docs, mail and CRM from anywhere with easy to use apps that will make your business run more smoothly.

Zendesk

Zendesk allows you to provide great customer support, and is built for team leaders, agents, those who don’t work from a desk. It also allows you to create new tickets on the fly, update Macros, check notifications, find the right tickets immediately from search and deep linking email, access reports, and dip into the agent dashboard to get an overview of any queue.

Desk

Desk is another customer relationship provider that uses next generation agent UI to stay on top of your customer service needs and collaborate with your team. It provides full search of your customer inquiries, resolve cases with a swipe, post internal notes, add quick replies and actions (macros), set case statuses and priorities, as well as receive push notifications about new cases!

Drift

A messaging app to help you grow your business, Drift allows you to talk to your website visitors from Slack without having to log out, makes it easy to target your message to the right person, and lets you capture email addresses inside the live chat feature. But that’s not all; you can also message your clients with in-app messages and surveys. Additionally Drift works with other apps such as Hubspot and Mailchimp in order to seamlessly integrate Drift into your existing workflow.

Zapier

Zapier allows you to connect your apps and automate your workflows. Zapier allows you to automatically move info between your web apps automatically freeing you up to focus on more important work. Zapier integrates all your web apps so they can pass info between the apps in workflows called “Zaps” which let you build processes quickly and easily without having to code them. There are more than 500 different apps, which work with Zapier allowing you to connect all your important apps with a few simple clicks.

Front

Front app is email redesigned for teams. This unique email manager allows you to centralize all of your company’s email communications in one collaborative inbox. Front is easy to use with almost no learning curve to speak of, and allows you to get rid of your messy inboxes in order to get work done faster.

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a helpdesk app, which allows you to support your customers across email, phone, chat, Facebook, Twitter and your website. Freshdesk gives you a quick overview of your help desk, access to all tickets, uses filters to prioritize the most urgent tickets, add watchers to a ticket, change ticket details, use one click scenario automations, delete tickets and mark irrelevant tickets as spam right from your phone, answer support calls, log time spent on a ticket and associate all of your twitter accounts with your support system in order to manage them all from the social tab.

Helpscout

Helpscout is a carefully crafted helpdesk that was designed to make the customer service process easier for the customer and for your team. Help Scout was specifically designed without all of the typical help desk obstructions so that you can provide a seamless customer service experience. Help scout’s report features provide all the data and analytics you need, while the 40+ integrations with other services allow you to pull in customer activity from other apps in seconds. Helpscout works with Docs and Beacon to provide a powerful support team under one roof!

Intercom

Intercom is a customer platform that has a suite of products to support live chat, marketing, and support. Intercom’s tools work for web, iOS and android apps. Some of the more popular and useful intercom apps are acquire which lets you chat with visitors on your website, engage which allows you to onboard new users, and support which allows your customers to reach out for help in your app, through email or across social media. The thing that makes intercom unique is that all of their products work together and they are powered by live customer data.

Mailjet

Mailjet is an email management app which allows you to manage your transactional and bulk emails. Mailjet lets you monitor your emails live to make sure that email delivery is under control no matter where you are or what you’re doing.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a cloud based CRM which boasts low setup costs, no hardware or software and no hassles. Salesforce allows you to track and manage contacts from lead to customer, personalize your pitches to your customer data, automate repetitive tasks and improve your productivity. In addition to helping to improve sales by an average of 37% Salesforce also keeps your data safe with enterprise level cloud security.

Hubspot

The inbound marketing giant Hubspot, provides a variety of mobile solutions in addition to their outstanding content marketing. The Hubspot app allows you to view reports in order to track progress across a variety of statistics, it allows you to manage contacts on the go, and has a host of social media functions which will allow you to monitor your social media accounts and compose and schedule posts.

Olark

Olark is a live chat service which helps you figure out who your visitors are and what they are looking at on your website. You can even see who is placing what items in their shopping carts. Olark is a customizable application which allows you to set it up to serve the specific customer service needs of your business and make your website seamlessly.

GrooveHQ

GrooveHQ is a help desk software made specifically for the needs of the small business. Groove is more than just a help desk, as they strive to provide everything you need to transform support tickets into amazing customer service experiences. Groove integrates with any email inbox to turn it into a customer service support center. Groove also helps you deliver a 24/7 knowledge base to provide additional support. Groove makes it easy to add a customer service form to any page of your website with it’s special widget.

Close.io

Close.io is a CRM service that focuses on helping you to close more deals and make more sales. Close.Io features a one touch calling system, which gives you lead information as soon as someone calls. With auto-logging of calls, emails and activity you’ll never have to do date entry again. Close.IO is a sales CRM created by salespeople for salespeople in Elastic’s sales lab. Close also integrates with Zapier integrations letting you do everything from create website contact forms to newsletters.

Aircall

A cloud based call center software, Aircall works with fast-moving teams to help manage their customer service and sales call needs. Aircall allows you to get local phone numbers in 40 countries, assign each team a different number to prevent missed calls, and integrates with slack, salesforce, desk and others to help you work within your existing systems.

Whew, that was a lot of information on a lot of extremely powerful apps!

Let’s quickly re-cap everything I have covered in this post.

First we took a look at how important customer service is to your business. I shared some eye opening statistics about how bad customer service can sink your business and some statistics about how better customer service can actually help you get and keep more customers.

Then we talked about how today’s customers want instant gratification. It’s no longer enough to get back to customers within 24 hours. Today’s customers want to be able to reach out and get a response to their problems in as close to real time as possible. Not only that but they want to be able to reach out to you in a wide variety of ways across a lot of different platforms such as social media, email and chat!

In order to keep up with the increasing demands of the customer and provide a world class customer service experience, you need some tools!

In this blog we looked at 20 of the most useful, productive tools for running your business.

But the point of this article is not to simply point out all of the wonderful productive tools that you can seamlessly integrate into your existing business. The point of this article is to get you to start using these apps and powering up your mobile solutions.

Now it’s time for you to take action!
I have provided you with the resources and links to all the apps you need to start to power up your business so that you can run it anywhere anytime, but that’s useless if you don’t take this information, apply it and start using these apps. So right here, right now, I want you to commit to downloading installing and using at least 1 of these apps in your business this week!.

Can you do that?

Great!

If you do, you’re going to see a huge difference in your productivity and sales!